After several months of hard work, InstaDesk 2.0 is finally ready for prime time. It features a completely new UI that gets rid of the cruft and the unnecessary complexity of the old version. Even more important, it is a clean slate to build upon. This means that there’re many exciting things in the pipeline, and this is the start.
This is a huge update with a completely revamped UI, new features, bug fixes from the old version, and in general a more solid codebase. Almost all parts of the code had to be touched in order for all this to be implemented. This is also reflected in a completely new icon that I really hope people will like.
The interest for Instagram apps has grown quite a bit over the past months, which resulted in a quite sizeable InstaDesk userbase. Since this version introduces many new features and changes so many existing ones, I’m almost confident that the one or other thing broke. InstaDesk 2.0 has gone through a long beta test period. Nevertheless, there’s probably the one or other bug in there. So if things don’t work as expected, hit the contact link and send me a mail.
InstaDesk 2.0 contains a plethora of new features and changes. Here’s a rundown:
Completely redesigned. InstaDesk 2.0 has a complete new layout that fits much better into Lion and Mountain Lion. Almost all parts of the interface have been changed to accomodate for the new layout and fit better with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. The icon has been changed, too, to celebrate version 2.0. I hope you like it. The new redesign uses more smooth animations and fancy shadow effects. On older machines, some of this can be turned off in the preferences.
Multiple user support. InstaDesk now lets you easily switch to a different user. By clicking on the account icon in the top left.
The detail view now supports a ‘mini gallery’ that shows you all other images in the current selection. You can navigate it either with mouse or touchpad gesturs, or with your mouse wheel, or by clicking and moving like you would click and move the scrollbar paddle.
Images can now be downloaded simply by dragging and dropping them on your desktop or any folder on your Mac. This also works with multiple selections.
Introducing a new Follow / Follower view that shows you all persons in a list. This is faster to navigate than the old view, displays more information, and even allows you to select multiple persons and follow / unfollow them at once. Also, you can sort by specified fields simply by clicking the headers of the table.
For selected views, there is now a ‘Load More’ menu entry, that allows you to load all, or a huge amount of items at once.
Selecting images has been changed from Single-Click to Double-Click. This makes it easier to select a set of images and act upon it (Liking, Slideshow, etc). You can get the old behaviour back by changing it to Single-Click open in the Preferences. You can select multiple images by drawing selections with your mouse, or shift-clicking individual items.
When you select a couple of images you can now press L to like them all. This is limited to up to 25 images.
Retina support throughout the whole app.
The sort setting is now being saved per view.
Updated to the new version of Growl but also made sure to still support older systems.
The icon view now features a right-click menu which lets you act upon one or multiple selected items.
In the Tagview, there is now a strength indicator for the related tags. This makes it easier to see how strong the relation between the current tag and the related tag is. If you hover over an indicator, it will give you the numbers in a tooltip.
The comment fields now save current comments as drafts until they’re being posted or until they’re manually removed. When quitting InstaDesk, they’re lost though.
The comment field now contains a character counter so that one doesn’t accidentally hit the Instagram comment length limit.
For private accounts, there is now a “Requests” view that allows you to allow / deny / block requests.
Changed the “Like” heart icon to be smaller so that it can’t be accidentally clicked anymore. The old, big, icon can still be re-activated in the preferences.
From the Userview, it is now possible to block or unblock a user.
There’s a new indicator that shows you whether a user is following you (small yellow triangle in the bottom left)
Updates from any of your favourite friends are now indicated by a white star in a red triangle in the right bottom corner.
Completely enabled everything to make InstaDesk run in the App Store Sandbox.
If one clicks on an already selected item in the left navigation list again, it will jump back to the top of the currently selected stack.
InstaDesk now remembers the size of the comment list in the detail view.
Switching images in the detail view should be faster now.
When the reply button in a comment cell is clicked, the @user is now correctly appended, caring for existing spaces and inserting new spaces when necessary.
Made the scrolling in large comment lists happen quite a bit faster.
The display of the location of the image has been cleaned and reorganized.
The indication for new images from favourite friends is stronger now
With Growl Mist all users, even these without Growl, can now have InstaDesk notifications for actions
Created new background images
And many more fixes and smaller changes.
InstaDesk 2.0 was a herculian effort, and I’m really excited about and looking forward to all your feedback!